Monday, September 16, 2013

Our congratulations, prayers and best wishes to the two men who were accepted into the Order on Saturday (September 14th is the feast of the Triumph of the Cross and is also the feast day of the Irish Dominican Province). Also to the four Brothers who made First Profession yesterday and the eight Brothers who renewed their vows on Friday. May God continue to bless you all in your formation as Friars Preachers.

Sunday, September 15, 2013

At
Vespers this evening we will sing: “This is Love’s great deed that death should
die, when life itself was slain up the tree.”Here we are faced with a paradox – a paradox which human nature has
always found difficult to grasp – and which is even more difficult nowadays.At Lauds we sang: “The holy Cross shines in
splendour”; “The holy Cross shines upon us, in the Cross is victory, in the
Cross is power.By the Cross every sin
is overcome.”We may ask ourselves if we
experience some of this victory and power in our daily lives. And if not why
not?

The
following passage from St Andrew of Crete
which we read at Office of Readings is particularly beautiful:

We are
celebrating the feast of the Cross, whereby darkness was dispelled and the
light restored. We are celebrating the feast of the Cross and with the
Crucified One we are raised up, leaving behind us the earth and sin so that we
may possess what is above. How great the Cross! What blessings it holds! He who
possesses it possesses a treasure.More
noble, more precious than anything on earth, in fact and in name, it is indeed
a treasure, for in it and through it and for it all the riches of our salvation
were stored away and restored to us.

The
folly of the Cross is truly a great mystery!At the very moment when Jesus is most helpless and vulnerable, nailed to
the Cross immobile a great hollow space is dug out, as it were, in His
heart for us; he reaches out to embrace sinful humanity, He speaks out both His and our ‘yes’ to the Father

as He commends His Spirit into the hands of the Father
(Lk 23:46) He donates Him to us (Jn 19:30)

and from His fullness we have all received.

The
Cross has always been central to Dominican spirituality – we are all
familiar with Fra Angelico’s beautiful frescos of Dominic at the foot of the
Cross.At the foot of the Cross Dominic
learned from the ‘Book of Love’ the immense love of our Saviour which led Him
to the Cross.Contemplating the
suffering, forsaken Jesus, Dominic’s compassionate heart was torn apart with
compassion, firstly, for Jesus whose love was being rejected by the very ones
for whom he died.Paul Murray speaks of
an ‘apostolic wound’ – ‘a contemplative wound’ which Dominic received -
no doubt the fruit of his ‘special’ prayer when, as a Canon at Osma, he asked
God “to grant him true charity, which would be effective in caring for and
winning the salvation of all;giving
himself up entirely for the salvation of others. We can say that our Order was born at the
foot of the Cross and it is there that each of us must draw our inspiration and
zeal.This too is the source from which
renewal will spring.

In his
correspondence with Blessed Diana, Blessed Jordan exhorts her always to have
before her eyes “the book of life, the book of the Lord’s perfect law which
brings life back to souls”.And he
continues:

this law is charity: you see it when you gaze on your Saviour Jesus stretched out on the Cross, as though a parchment, his wounds the writing, his blood the illuminations. Where, I ask you, my beloved, could the lesson of love be learnt as it is learnt here?

And according to St Catherine of Siena, Dominic wanted his
children to

stand at the table of the Cross – to seek only the glory and
praise of God and the salvation of souls

As
we take our place with Dominic and Mary at the foot of the Cross we begin to
understand the meaning of our vocation.

The Cross and Veritas

There
is a very close link between the Cross and Veritas
(Truth) - the motto of our Order.“The
Cross verifies the truth about God and the truth about humankind”.

The
truth about God: When we look at the Cross we are left in no doubt of God’s
infinite love –This is how God loves.

The
truth about humans:the Cross
reveals the dignity of every person – how precious we are in God’s sight that
He should die for us!

But the
Cross does not rob us of joy – the contrary is true as we sing in the liturgy:
“through the Cross joy has come into the whole world” and with it freedom.Jesus has taken the
burden of our sin on Himself and has already achieved our eternal
salvation.Our task lies not in anxious
striving to achieve our own perfection but in opening ourselves to receive the
gift. “At the very moment when he identifies with our sin, ‘abandoned’ by the
Father, Jesus ‘abandons’ himself into the hands of the Father”.We in our turn can abandon ourselves and
those we carry in our hearts to the loving mercy of our God in the sure hope
that “all will be well”.

Vocation Weekends

Whom do you seek?

We seek God, Who alone gives meaning to our lives. Communion with Christ and with one another in love, through a life of prayer centred on Jesus, the Word of God and on the Eucharist, is the focus of our community life.

Single young women attracted to this way of life are welcome to contact us and we will arrange for a visit or some days in our retreat house - either at weekend or during the week. If a few are interested at same time, and if agreeable to all, we can also arrange for a group to spend a few days together.